Hello world :-)

• I have been a linux user since about 1997. I ran Redhat, until they stopped distributing a free version. I worked in the corporate world as an I.T. developer for 20 years. Lately I have not been making a living out of being a propellerhead, but am more of an end-user of software packages. I spend most of my computer-time -
  • browsing the web with Firefox,
  • emailing,

  • writing words and occasional invoices with openoffice,

  • accounting and writing other occasional invoices with sql-ledger.
  • However I am fairly much weaned off computers for days and sometimes weeks at a time. I try not to subject my eyes to staring at a computer screen more than four or five hours a week if possible. My last solid sessions in the computer and linux world were in 2006:
    • June - I spent maybe 70 hours installing Breezy on three machines, and getting networking working.
    • July - Installed Dapper onto them, and found that all the work I had done with networking and also CUPS-networking for Breezy needed revisiting! Never did get CUPs-networking going again.
    • September and October: installed, customised, assessed and discarded in turn these distros
      1. Knoppix
      2. Puppy
      3. PCLinuxOS
      4. Xubuntu
      5. Ubuntu (Dapper) set up to work nicely on hired-out PCs. the objective was that they needed to be easily and semi-automatically -
      6. installed onto new PCs and
      7. resettable by a very non-technical person each time a hirer returned the PC. (I am updating this web page on that PC. Its running Ubuntu Edgy, and it can dual-boot into Puppy)

• I first installed Ubuntu (Warty) in 2005. I run the latest standard production version. My current main PC is a 2003 vintage Toshiba 1800 laptop. Almost everything runs fine on it (except it will not reboot), and it does what I need. Sometime soon though, I would like to install a wireless network card. If you have one installed into a similar laptop and the adapter is available in Australia and easily installed, please email me and let me know.

• I would like to see better more concise documentation with Ubuntu and for that matter in the linux and free software world in general. In early-mid 2006 I wrote the NetworkPrintingWithUbuntu page, and thought that if I got time I would like to have tidied up a lot of wiki pages around here. At the time I thought -

  There is urgent need to get summary information/findings out of mail lists and into this wiki. I see wikis as potentially the best type of repository for quality information. However it is only as good or bad as the content, and there is a huge amount of poorly written (and even very badly spelt) stuff here. Even the grammar is pitiful in many places, and I have seen scores of instances where this leads to confusion and incorrect information being disseminated. Hmm, I just read about the WikiCleanupProposal. Great idea folks! Excuse me while I correct spelling on it "achieve : i before e, except after c".

However, I found that many of the documentation team took offence to suggestions that the wiki was such a mess, so my suggestions about how to get control over this via such mechanisms as agreed rules, process, specific procedures, etc were badly received. Interestingly, I have found one or two others elsewhere that have the same opinion, so at least I know that I am not alone with this view. Moreover those others tend to also be older more experienced people who like me were involved in large corporate projects, and have seen the inevitable collapse of many projects over time that were not well managed (with hundreds of millions of dollars going down the drain each time).

For more info about me, try my old 2004 web pages

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